10 Useful Chrome Extensions For Efficient Tabs Management

Tab is an useful functionality in all browsers, but when you have more than 20 tabs opened, you will know that it is not an easy task to manage them all. Most of the time will be spent searching for a particular tab then reading the content. If you are looking for ways to ease your tabs burden, here are 10 useful tabs management extensions that you can use in your Chrome browser. Firefox users can check out this list here.

If you have used TooManyTabs in Firefox, you will love this similar extension for Chrome too. They are from the same developers, but this TMT for Chrome is much more visually pleasing than the Firefox version.

When clicked, TMT will show a window containing all the opened tabs in your current session. You can then click on any tabs that you have currently no use for to move it to the suspended tabs section. The tab state will be saved and memory will be released for other usage. At any point of time, you can easily retrieve back your suspended tabs (and its saved state) by clicking on it in the right column.

When your tab list get longer and longer, you no longer can see the favicon and the title of the tab. When such things happen, Quick Tabs will come in handy. Quick Tabs lists all your tabs in a vertical dropdown fashion and you can easily scroll down to locate the tab you want. In addition, it also comes with a search bar for you to search your opened tabs.

What I really like about this extension is the availability of keyboard shortcuts and the option to choose how many tabs to display in the list. I can easily press Ctrl + M to open the popup window or Ctrl + d to close a tab shortcut.

Personally, I have not reached the tabs nirvana stage where I need to search for my opened tabs, but for those who are into tabs surfing, this is a really useful extension. Another similar extension is Tab Menu.

For those who are tired of going to the History section to retrieve your closed tabs, this extension is going to be very useful. What it does is to show you a list of tabs that you have previously closed so you can retrieve it quickly and easily.

In the settings, you can choose how many closed tabs to display. One thing though, the closed tab list is only valid for the current session. If you restart your Chrome (or start a new session), the previous closed tab list will be gone.

In usual situation, when you click a link to open in a new tab, you will still need to click on the new tab to make it the active tab. Tabs to the front! automatically make the newly created tab the active tab and it saves you the effort to click on it.

When working with many tabs at the same time, it’s hard to remember which one you want to go next. TabJump highlights frequently used tabs and related tabs so you can easily jump between them. In addition, TabJump store your recently closed tabs in the same list so you can easily retrieve them.

Usually, when you click to open a new tab, it will open itself in the right side of the current tab. It will also open in the background and you have to click it to make it active. Now, if you want to change the behavior of the tab opening, then TabsPlus is the one for you. With TabsPlus, you can select whether to open the new tab as the first tab (extreme left) or as the last tab (extreme right). You can also choose to open in the background or foreground.

With New Tab Redirect, you can now set a custom URL to load in new tabs. You can choose from Chrome’s about pages, a few popular URLs, or provide your own. Your custom tab can also be a local file, allowing you to create your own new tab page.

Of course, if you are using extensions like Speed Dial, this extension won’t work.

Tab Wrangler closes a tab if it has inactive for a period time. This is useful if you have the habit of opening many tabs and forget to close them later. The default time is 7 minutes, but you can change it in the settings.

10. JoinTabs (Update: no longer exists)

JoinTabs come in the form of an icon where you can click to combine the tabs from different Chrome windows into one window. It works also with popup windows, but not pinned tabs.

Which extensions do you use to manage your tabs in Chrome?

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I cannot use Chome until someone makes a LastTab for it. When I click on the tab that is currently already open, I want to be taken to the previously open tab. That way, I can easily, quickly, switch between two tabs. Not sure how people live without it…

Does Google Chrome have a “Bar Tab” addon like Firefox. What is does is keep all your tabs from the last session, but when you reopen Firefox the tabs load but not the pages. Until they are clicked, then they are loaded with the latest refresh. Maxthlon does this too but it loads a previous session list that can be clicked. Opera and Chrome just open every page that was left open before, causing serious slowdown on my internet reloading all of my tabs. Plus the browser is not re-getting that page every time I open the browser, only when I actually visit the page.

Oh my god all I want is to get to THE PREVIOUS TAB when I press ctrl+tab! Why is this so complicated? Is there any extension that would make it behave like this please? You can set this in tabmix plus in FireFox, but I seriously wonder why this is not a default in every browser. When I open a new link, check it briefly and leave it open for later work I just simply want to ctrl+tab to get me back to that tab I was before!

ctrl+shift+tab takes you to the left hand adjacent tab. I don’t know whether that’s what Vít?zslav Žurek wanted, but I want to be able to get back to the tab I was previously on, particularly if I delete a tab. In Firefox I used to be able to set that as an option.

Actually ctrl+shift+t opens a new tab at the extreme right (or it does with my copy of Chrome) but TabsPlus seems to provide the option I want when I close a tab, even if I still have no shortcut back to my previous tab when I don’t close the tab I’m on

Ctrl-Tab will scroll through the tabs to the right starting with the tab you are on. Ctrl-Shift-Tab just reverses the order of tab scrolling to the left starting from the tab you are on.

Is there a way to scroll through the tabs starting from the one you are on, to the last one looked at, then the one before that, then the one before that, etc. etc. – regardless of where those tabs are in the list?

Amen! I’ve been trying to find this for years. I’ve kinda gotten used to a workaround extension called Tab Stack that moves your currently selected tab into the leftmost position so that pressing Ctrl-Tab iterates through your tabs in MRU order. But there are definitely things I don’t like about this behavior. In the TabMix Plus extension for FireFox, as long as you kept holding down Ctrl while tapping tab through your tabs, it knew that you were still in the process of looking for the tab you wanted. With Tab Stack, it instead uses a timer so that if you pause on a tab for too long (even if you still have Ctrl pressed), it’ll move that tab all the way to the left as if you had chosen to land on that tab.

There’s another extension that keeps track of MRU and lets you assign a hotkey to use, but there are some limits — 1. you can’t use built-in key combinations (like ctrl-tab), and 2) if you hit a system page, like Options or Extension Manager, you get stuck and have to manually click away from that tab.

Still can’t believe Google hasn’t given us the option to select MRU tab order yet. :((

I have searched for the SIMPLE function to open (in background) and close a tab with the MIDDLE CLICK..but EVERYTHING (Exts) I have tried DO NOT WORK! ARRGGHH!!! This is ESSENTIAL to my FF browsing experience but all Chrome does is open 2 duplicate tabs when I try to double click on a link or just open the link as if I have left clicked. AARRGGHHH!!

I DO NOT UNDERSTAND WHY most probably such a SIMPLE line of code is SO difficult to add to Chrome…Until this I will never consider replacing FF with Chrome.

Has anyone even considered, instead of the 100000000 different extensions for a lot of the time for the same thing, make one like TAB MIX PLUS for FF?!

Seems the Chrome App store is the same as Android Market/Google Play – overloaded with pointless Apps which someone with a bit of initiative can EASILY combine in ONE app!. If I knew how to code, I would do it myself!

Not every part of the code in the Chrome browser can be accessed/modified by the developers. Like the annoying download bar that popup when you download a file and it refuses to close automatically after the download finishes, and also the tab feature. So it is not totally the developers fault. Google probably wanted to keep some part of the code private and personal so the user can still enjoy the full Chrome experience.

I’m so excited! I love tabs. Especially using Better Touch Tool with my MacBook Pro trackpad. I’ve added some great gestures specifically for chrome. Four Finger Tap closes current tab, Three Finger Swipe UP goes to the tab to the right, Three Finger Swipe DOWN goes to the tab on the left. Five Finger Click opens a new tab, Three Finger Click opens links in a new tab. With these new extensions I’m going to be tabbin’ like crazy. Look out internet, I’ll never not click a link again.